Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Tuesday Tunes Tastings

Alright, so since I've decided during my break to add my own music awards to the slate (The Mouthis), I figured I should start reviewing/grading music releases, and what better way to do it then through a post each week dedicated to new releases! So, every Tuesday (barring some awful issue), I'll be posting Tuesday Tunes Tastings, a rundown of the albums that dropped the Friday before that I was album to...taste. I'll only be grading full albums, not single releases, since in order to be eligible for The Mouthis you must have your songs part of an album or ep.

Now, I've decided to grade these on a scale of Miley tongues, since it has become evident that more and more of you need to be reminded of Miley Cyrus's talent and incredible contribution to modern pop, so she'll be grading these releases accordingly.

Now, this week (err, last week) only brought us one actual new release (Opeth re-released a remastered version of two of their lauded albums, but I'm not grading re-releases) and so this will be a nice tester as to how well these posts will work out.

Let's get right into it!

Wildfire [Rachel Platten]

So, if you’re looking for a solid
pop album, this is one I’d check out.
Apparently Platten has been working her way up to this breakthrough for
a while now, but let’s be honest; no one had heard of her before Fight Song was released last year. I’ll be pretty clear with this; if you don’t
like Fight Song, you won’t like this album.
This is straight up mainstream pop without much experimentation here,
aside from the island vibes heard of Hey
Hey Hallelujah (her collaboration with Andy Grammer) and a few slivers of
90’s R&B thrown around here and there, but I’m not hating on that
aspect. This is the kind of pop music
that most mainstream pop acts wish they could make consistently. I think that’s what makes this album a nice
addition to your music library; it’s consistent. There isn’t really a hiccup here (although
the mid-album slump can be heard on Lone Ranger and Angels In Chelsea). The two
singles; Fight Song and Stand By You, are solid and catchy and
serve as a nice foregleam to the inoffensive lineup of pop ballads Platten has
on her tracklist. Platten’s voice is a
nice mix of soft and hard. It shows
experience, even if the songs/lyrics on her album don’t really match the depth
of life in her voice. She has a nicely
worn tone, which really shines on songs like Speechless and especially on Congratulations,
which is probably the most mature track on the album and certainly the most
impactful.

Grade:

3 1/2 Miley Tongues

Why? For what it is, this
album is pretty solid. It’s wholly
listenable and holds up after multiple listens (yes, I’ve listened to it a few
times since Friday). That being said,
multiple listens really showed the lack of depth in the songs here. Like, they are solid but they are also
semi-generic and that leaves the album as a whole feeling a tad forgettable. You won’t feel the urge to skip a single
track while listening to the album, but you won’t necessarily feel an urge to
listen to it all over again once it’s over.

Love the Miley tongues. Of course, I'm taking it as a little bit of shade thrown my way, though. It's cool. I do know she is talented and I have always loved her physical voice even when she was on Disney. Her antics and the constant circus around her just rubs me the wrong way. It feels like someone purposely going out of their way to appear edgy and outrageous instead of naturally being that way. It's like she's still trying to prove she's not Hannah Montana years after we all got the point.

Enough about her.

As for this album, I'll probably skip it. I mean, I loved Fight Song, until I got tired of it after about two weeks of hearing it all day long everywhere I went. I don't think I can take that much syrup which it sounds like this is.

Her public persona has gone too far, I agree...but her recent musical output is just great. Bangerz is THE PERFECT Pop album...and Her Dead Petz is so experimentally rewarding.

As for Platten...not experimental enough, so skipping it is fine; but if you have Spotify, I recommend checking out Congratulations at least, as the R&B slink and her tonally textured voice make it a really great track.

Tuesday Tunes Tastings, love it, though Miley as your rating graphic? Hmmmm :P I just heard Hey Hey Hallelujah recently, she's pretty good, though I generally don't listen to contemporary music. I'm so old school when it comes to music, it's either classical radio or soundtracks, ahah.

Great idea! I would be amazing to see Tuesday Tunes Tastings every Tuesday. I like your review overall, tho I disagree a little with it.

Here, my few thoughts on the album. (Thank God I found a way to access Spotify, an Unorthodox one for that matter.)The production was very eh. There is an acoustic guitar and then all the sudden synthesizers. And it's very much percussion over melody, something I can accept (Confident), but the majority of the times hate.Very forgettable songs, something that pop music shouldn't be. Pop music is probably the bottom of the barrel for music (not that I hate pop music, I just find it the weakest out of all genres), and the thing that a pop album could have going for it is memorability, this album hasn't that.Rachel Platten doesn't strike me as a great singer. She doesn't have a lot of personality so that's also a problem. I feel that she could be replaced by any other singer that tries to inspire, in other words, a pour man's Kelly Clarkson.The song writing is the biggest problem, at least for me."Fight Song", according to Platten "the story of the many rejections I received from record labels" (not that anybody could guess that), is a very generic written song that tries to appeal to everybody and ends up sounding like nothing. The rhyme scheme is too weak, rhyming "song" with "song with "song. It's a a wanna be inspirational anthem that feels lifeless. This being called by many a grand inspiring track hurts when guys like Kendrick Lamar make such gems as "i". "Stand By You" doesn't sound as generic as "Fight Song" but I think it's a bit worse.(I like your grading system, but...)1.5 slices of bread with mayonnaise out of 5, for a very misleading title.

Yeah, I mean, I find it solid for what it is, which is generic pop, and I found the whole experience of the album rather pleasant, which is why I say it's a solid and inoffensive album...but like you, I agree that it is generic and forgettable.

Dude, where the f--k do you find the time to listen to this album, let alone ANY album like, more than once? If I here a song I like twice in the same month I assume the lead singer has died and I scour the internet like a f--king moron.

Listening to music is so much easier for me than watching a movie since I work on the computer and can have Spotify running all day...so I can pack in anywhere from 4-8 albums in a day depending on their length and how busy I am.

About Me

What is there to say? I love movies, books, music...whatever and I love talking about it. I love predicting Oscars and publishing my own personal awards (Fistis!) and I love hearing what you have to say about what I have to post. It's come a long way from it's very humble (and slightly embarrassing) beginnings and has turned into a blog that I'm very proud to be the founder of.